Donald “Uday” Trump, Jr., has managed the almost unimaginable: he’s squeezed yet another lie into that one freakin’ story.
He (and Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort) lied about not meeting with Russians. And they got caught. Then they lied about Natalia Veselnitskaya’s interests. And got caught. They lied about why they were there. And got caught. They lied about the meeting’s importance. (Technically, they haven’t gotten caught about that one because nobody even tries to believe it.) They lied about what they knew before the meeting, and what they knew after. They even like after they’d released the emails proving the lie.
And, of course, they lied about whether the meeting was collusion (and got caught), about whether it was illegal (and got caught), and whether ‘anyone’ would have done the same (disproved even before they made the lie). They all claimed that the Orange Trump knew nothing about it, even though Trump teased the great dirt he was going to release a few hours later (but never did). And I expect they’re lying when they shriek that the meeting was a big nothingness nothingburger from nowheresville. That one’s still their story, but I don’t expect that lie to last for more than a couple of news cycles.
On top of all of that painfully, miserably stupid lying, NBC just reported that “Former Soviet Counterintelligence Officer at Meeting With Donald Trump Jr. and Russian Lawyer.” Apparently, Ms Veselnitskaya didn’t just arrive with a translator, she had this other guy, too, who NBC describes as a Russian-American lobbyist, and as “…A former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence.”
“…Ties to Russian intelligence.”
You’ll have to imagine my happy dance. Not that I mean Uday (or even Qusay) real harm, but I hate being lied to. I really hate being lied to by people doing public business for me, in my name. And I especially hate when they lie over and over, baldly and so astoundingly, numbingly badly as they do, secure that lying will never matter for people like them.
Despite all the public attention — all the questions about their honesty and their honor, all the press reports that Junior is a person of such “high quality’ that he’s too dumb to get out of the rain, all the frantic updating of previously sworn statements and testimonies by everyone involved — it’s interesting that neither Junior, Manafort, nor Kushner felt obliged to correct that omission before they got caught.
Maybe all three forgot there was another Russian intelligence agent in the room?
Update: Sorry, I missed one. President Trump (Senior) said that he hadn’t heard about the collusion meeting until he heard it on the news. (I originally wrote it was “when he read it in the news”, but, of course, Trump doesn’t read.)
So, yeah, recent news to Trump. A couple of days. Except, later in that same interview, Trump himself admitted that he’d really heard about the meeting before that, but that somehow, the fact that he’d been told about it didn’t mean that he knew about it.
A couple of days. Except that the papers alerted his administration of what they had prior to publication, when they asked for comment. Trump’s people looked at it, talked about it, came up with public statements, and Trump then signed off on a public statement about the collusion meeting the weekend before the news was came out.
None of which stops Trump from continuing to claim he hadn’t heard about it until it came out. And none of that has any connection (Absolutely none! Fake News!! Sad) to his public promise (and quiet reneging) of a huge — HUGE! — amount of dirt on Hillary. The same day as the collusion meeting.
I’m with John Oliver: this is Stupid Watergate: “A scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate, but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything.”
